And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (5 page)

There is a problem of course with this general historic narrative. It blames every problem Muslims face on the West. Another way of explaining the Middle East’s chronic instability for the last century is that the Islamic world, which embraces all Muslims as brothers and sisters, has failed to adjust to the nation-state system that replaced the empires that rose and fell but dominated civilization until World War I.

Even carefully drawn borders after the First World War would have been problematic in a region that had no concept of nation states or parliaments. But the European victors made a total hash of it. Ethnic minorities were divided and put in different states. The Kurdish people were scattered among five nations. Syria was reduced to a tiny fraction of the powerful Ottoman province it once was, even more insulting since it had once been a capital of the early caliphate. Iraq was cobbled together with different Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds and given almost no access to the sea. A Jewish entity was established by mandate in Palestine (it became the state of Israel in 1948). World War I and the treaties and promises made by Europeans after it left the Middle East hopelessly divided.

The Arab caliphate, which had survived the Crusades only to be destroyed by the Mongols, had been reborn with the Ottomans. Now in the modern era, while Americans landed men on the moon and Western science sequenced the human genome, the house of Islam was in pieces and humiliated, the shrapnel from a giant explosion, the afterthought of victorious European powers. This great decline is the basic grievance in the Middle
East. It is why Osama bin Laden went to war with the West. It is why the United States has been able to do little to stop Islamic radicals who see nation-building as an attempt to reinforce a foreign system, trickery under the banner of democracy.

Ironically enough, the United States had almost nothing to do with the age-old conflict between Islam and the West. The founding of Constantinople, the birth of Islam, and the Crusades occurred centuries before North America was even colonized. The United States was only peripherally involved in creating the borders of the Middle East after World War I. This centuries-old conflict was not America’s fight, but Washington blundered into it and chose to make stabilizing the Middle East its main foreign policy objective.

After World War II, and especially during the Cold War, the United States became the guardian of Middle East stability. Islamic fundamentalists believe the United States has been policing a Middle East full of divisions that were deliberately put there to keep the region weak, keep Israel secure, and keep pro-American autocracies in place in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and, until 1979, Iran—in short, to keep Muslims locked in a nation-state system that thwarted the rightful destiny of Islam. The fundamentalists were convinced that it was Israel and the Jews who really understood this game, using American muscle to keep Islam at bay.

I think of bin Laden as a violent and angry historian, but he left major gaps. In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis.
Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means “through war,” so it is a militant movement seeking an “originalist” form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East.

In Cairo, living among the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi dreamers, and seeing the horrors of what Salafi jihadis did at the Egyptian Museum and in Luxor, I delved deeper into the political side of the Islamic movement. I came in contact with a group called Tabligh wa Dawa.
Tabligh
means “to inform” and
dawa
means “to call,” so roughly speaking the name of the group is “inform and call.” It’s a Salafi group, not violent but strict in its adherence to the words of Mohammed. It conducts Islamic patrols to
inform
Muslims when they are straying from the Prophet’s teachings and
call
them to the righteous path.

I wanted to get to know these people because they have the same mind-set as violent fundamentalists. If someone from al-Qaeda sat down with members of Tabligh wa Dawa, they would agree on everything except how to get from A to B. They would agree on the fundamental narration of history: that Islam was perfect and that the caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols, reborn under the Ottomans, destroyed again by the Europeans, and locked into submission by a nation-state structure enforced by America and Israel.

As far as getting from A to B, a leader of Tabligh wa Dawa would say, “There’s nothing we can do about it, let’s just go to the mosque and pray for better days.” Bin Laden would have replied,
“No, we’re going to knock down buildings, we’re going to pull planes out of the sky, and we’re going to kill tourists, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to bring down the infidels.” Only a tiny portion of Muslims agree with bin Laden’s tactics, but many millions understand the world vision he’s talking about.

So I arranged to go out with a Tabligh wa Dawa patrol. We met at night on a street corner in old Cairo. They were dressed in white with short
jellabiyas
, which are a kind of pajama dress. They also had turbans with long tails hanging from the back. They looked a little like nuns, except for their beards. And they were the most polite, soft-spoken people you’d ever meet. “Hello, brother. How are you, brother?” Everyone’s a brother. “Oh, it’s so good to see you.” If one of them had a dollar, he’d give you half and then tell you for an hour why Islam requires Muslims to be generous and share.

They were religious fanatics but gentle. That’s the kind of Islam they wanted to project. They would go up to people who were drinking or smoking and try to win them over with kindness. “Oh, my brother, how can you do this to yourself ? Come and have a sandwich with us. And then let’s go to the mosque and pray.”

I spent a night with these people going from coffee shop to coffee shop. The whole time they were trying to convert me because I was among them as a non-Muslim. “If I don’t try and bring you to Islam,” one of them told me, “you’re going to go to hell, and then I’m going to go to hell too for not having tried to bring you into the faith.”

During this conversation, he took out a cigarette lighter and told me to put out my hand. Then he lit the lighter and held my hand over it. It was hot and I pulled my hand away.

“No, no, no,” he said, and put the lighter under my hand
again. “You see that? That’s just a little, tiny fire and you pulled your hand away. It hurt.”

“Yes, it did.”

“Well, how about if you’re in the fires of hell for eternity and they’re burning you for eternity, how would you deal with that?”

I was trying to stay in their good graces so I played the game a bit. “Well, that would be terrible. I couldn’t handle that.”

“Well, if you come to Islam, not only will you not have this hellfire, you have virgins when you die, dark-eyed virgins who are waiting for you in heaven.” It was a perfect fantasy and quite sexualized.

Their vision of heaven had a lot of sexualization. Heaven was the antithesis of Egypt. It was sweet smelling, the water was clean, there was no garbage, and beautiful virgins were everywhere. I got along well enough with the Tabligh wa Dawa and started spending a lot of time with them because they were a window on the fundamentalist world. It wasn’t violent, but all you needed to do was pull the switch. They were almost comically gentle, but completely saw the world in black and white, right and wrong. If they were convinced something was against Allah, it wouldn’t take much for them to kill. That’s what bin Laden did, he made Salafis into jihadis and turned them on the United States.

I left the
Middle Eastern Times
in 1998 and started freelancing for ABC,
The World
(a coproduction of the BBC and Public Radio International), and other news organizations large and small that paid my airfare and expenses so I could travel. My first trip to Saudi Arabia was an eye-opener, and it’s worth recounting because the Saudis are so central to the problem of militant fundamentalism. In many ways, they are its father. Their Wahhabi vision is a form of Salafism, and it doesn’t take much to push this intolerant and
unforgiving ideology into bin Laden’s way of thinking about permanent war with the West.

The Wahhabi movement began as a reaction to the Ottoman Empire. For one thing, the Ottomans weren’t Arab. They were people from the steppes—Central Asians, Turkmen, and other non-Arabs. The Ottoman Empire was incredibly diverse with many Muslim converts from the Caucasus in high positions. The Ottomans at various times were also not especially strict Muslims. Some sultans wrote classical music and operas, which are prohibited by Islam. Other sultans—who also had the title of caliph or successor to Mohammed—even painted nudes. Some drank alcohol. Nearly all the Ottoman leaders failed to follow the Prophet’s model of simplicity. The Ottoman Empire was lavish, as can be seen by a quick tour of the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. The hilt of the Topkapi dagger, the target of thieves in the movie
Topkapi
, is ornamented with three large emeralds. Two large candleholders are mounted with 6,666 diamonds. A gold throne is here, a gold bassinet is there, jewels are everywhere. The names of sections of the palace capture the lifestyle of the sultans: the Imperial Harem, Courtyard of the Sultan’s Concubines and Consorts, the Courtyard of the Eunuchs. Mohammed probably would have felt out of place.

The Ottomans used to travel to Mecca and Medina for the annual hajj in enormous caravans. They would bring gifts for the mosques, or even encase parts of the Shires in precious metals. The displays of wealth enraged the local Wahhabis. The Wahhabis, by contrast, celebrated Mohammed, an illiterate grain trader who married a wealthy older woman but continued to live simply, eating dates and drinking camel milk. The Wahhabis embrace Mohammed’s nomadic ethical system born of, and perhaps
appropriate to, the harsh deserts of Arabia, valuing loyalty, generosity, physical endurance, and hospitality, as well as bravery in battle, dedication to family honor, and insistence on revenge. For the Wahhabis the highest aspiration would be to live as if they were in the days of the Prophet, acting as much like the Prophet as possible, rejecting the trappings of modernity. The Wahhabi movement also began a pro-Arab movement. Mohammed was an Arab from Arabia. He spoke Arabic. That the lavish Ottoman sultans didn’t come from Arabia and often spoke little Arabic were all the more upsetting to the Wahhabis.

The early Wahhabi movement was a puritanical and violent reaction to the Ottoman excesses, and it spread the way ISIS would two centuries later. In the first few years of the 1800s, the Ottoman Empire faced an insurgency in Arabia led by fanatical Wahhabis who attacked Ottoman convoys, killed Shiites and destroyed their shrines in Iraq, eradicated antiquities, and cleansed the region of minorities and others who didn’t follow their interpretation of Islam. The insurgents were followers of Salafi cleric Mohammed Ibn Wahhab and tribal chiefs of the al-Saud clan. By 1805 the forces of this alliance had conquered Mecca and Medina and committed massacres at Karbala in Iraq. The Ottomans pushed back with the 1811–18 Ottoman Wahhabi War, led by the Ottoman’s viceroy in Egypt. The Ottoman forces ultimately prevailed, expressing outrage by taking Amir Abdullah bin Saud to Istanbul to be executed. The Ottomans took revenge by forcing him to listen to music before he was hanged, beheaded, and had his heart cut out of his body. His head was on display in Istanbul for three days. This Saud-Wahhabi alliance was defeated, but it would rise again in the early twentieth century under Abdulaziz al-Saud, better known simply as Ibn Saud (son of Saud), who would become
the founder of modern Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud revived the zeal of the initial Wahhabi uprising with a fanatical fighting force known as the
Ikhwan
, the Brothers, not to be confused with the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

On the surface it is difficult to understand why strict Wahhabism would appeal to masses of Muslims. Like all austere faiths, it is hard to warm up to. People have tended to be drawn to religions they can touch and feel with exciting festivals, specialty foods, inspiring saints and martyrs, music, art, icons, shrines, and promises of salvation. Salafism, or its Saudi form, Wahhabism, offers none of these. In fact, it actively preaches the opposite. In Salafism and Wahhabism there can be no music. No mingling of the sexes. No art. No alcohol. No dancing. No shrines other than mosques. Only prayer and submission to Allah’s unbending will. As a way of life, it is not much fun. I like to think of Wahhabis (or Salafis) as akin to the Amish. Clearly the Amish are innocent of the savage violence associated with many Islamic extremist groups, but I make the comparison only to point out that both believe in a literal and inflexible interpretation of an ancient text, rejecting modernity. But why do the Amish have little mass appeal and no influence in world affairs, while Wahhabism has spread far and wide across the Islamic world? The answer is location and wealth. The Wahhabis, once they aligned with the Saud clan, took control of Mecca and Medina, the centers of Islam, where every year millions of Muslims congregate for the hajj. By dominating the physical center of the faith the Wahhabis have been able to exercise an outsize influence on the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.

Then, in the twentieth century, Saudi Arabia struck it rich. For many Saudis, the oil under their feet was further proof of Allah’s blessing, a gift to Mohammed’s homeland and the custodians of
his faith. The combination of the annual hajj and an effectively limitless budget pushed Saudi Arabia’s interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, all across the Muslim world. For the last several decades, Saudi Arabia has funded untold numbers of mosques and Islamic charities and trained and inspired thousands, if not tens of thousands of clerics, in what the Wahhabis like to call “pure Islam.” Wahhabis don’t like to be called Wahhabis, or Salafis either. They like to be simply called Muslims, as if there was no other interpretation than their own. With its location and fantastic wealth, Saudi Arabia has set the tone for modern Islam. The faith would likely be very different if Wahhabis had never taken over Mecca and Medina or if there was only sand in the Arabian Desert. To continue the thought experiment, imagine if the Amish controlled St. Peter’s in Rome and the churches in Jerusalem and suddenly became wealthy beyond measure. It’s likely their impact would be far greater than it is today.